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In a piece that circulated widely yesterday, WIRED reporter Ryan Singel claims that Google has "flip-flopped" on its stand on Net Neutrality. , writes Singel, "told the that the network neutrality rules Google once championed don’t give citizens the right to run servers on their home broadband connections."

At particular issue is Google Fiber. Last year, a man named Douglas McClendon argued that Google's Terms of Service violate the FCC's Net Neutrality rules because they do not permit servers to attach to their network. The particular language objected to can be found here, and reads in part:

Your Google Fiber account is for your use and the reasonable use of your guests. Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection, use your Google Fiber account to provide a large number of people with Internet access, or use your Google Fiber account to provide commercial services to third parties (including, but not limited to, selling Internet access to third parties).

The company reiterated this position in its response to the FCC. Singel and others have interpreted this to mean that "Google’s legally binding Terms of Service outlaw Google Fiber customers from running their own mail server, using a remotely accessible media server, SSHing into a home computer from work to retrieve files, running a Minecraft server for friends to share, using a Nest thermometer, using a nanny camera to watch over a childcare provider or using a Raspberry Pi to host a WordPress blog."

However, in the footnotes of its response to the FCC, Google claimed that "The policy does not prevent legal, noncommercial use of applications such as multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, and home security."

I emailed Google about this, and they replied with this statement: "Google is a strong supporter of the open Internet and our stance here hasn't changed. This is a standard practice of network management, and as we said in our filing, the policy does not prevent legal, noncommercial use of applications such as multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, and home security."

Broadband Reports' reporter Karl Bode believes that Singel's claims about Google's TOS in this case are "overblown." In a blog post on the subject, Bode states that:

Except Google Fiber's "ban" on servers isn't really a ban on servers, and it isn't part of Google's race to the dark side. To start, if you've been around this industry at all over the last decade, you'll know that nearly every ISP has this kind of language embedded in their terms of service in one form or another to help differentiate residential and business services and manage extreme consumption. The language is designed to give the ISP a little leeway in stopping customers from running commercial-grade servers on residential lines instead of ponying up for a business-grade connection like a big boy.

With that said such language is very rarely actually enforced, and many users never run into a problem running full-grade servers at home.

This parallels an argument that Google itself made in its response to the FCC, where it noted that many of its competitors' Terms of Service have similar language. The company also claims that its terms fall under "reasonable network management" as defined by the FCC's Net Neutrality rules.

For Bode's part, he has considerable complaints about Google's Net Neutrality stance, but this isn't one of them. He also cautions net neturality advocates against making this kind of complaint.

"Conflating crappy, overly broad terms of service with neutrality violations is also a form of crying wolf," he wrote. "We're now calling so many things a 'neutrality violation,' people won't be sure (or care) when an actual violation occurs."